party; let him cease being profitable to you; let him weary of flattering you with his praise; let him forget you, neglect you, despise you, and go against you, and then look at your own heart.  Do you care now to know what malice is?  Well, that is malice that distorts and rends your heart as often as you meet that man on the street or even pass by his door.  That is malice that dances in your eyes when you see his name in print.  That is malice with which you always break out when his name is mentioned in conversation.  That is malice that heats your heart when you suddenly recollect him in the multitude of your thoughts within you.  And you are in good company all the time.  ’We, ourselves,’ says Paul to Titus, ’we also at one time lived in malice and in envy.  We were hateful and we hated one another.’  ‘Hateful,’ Goodwin goes on in his great book, ’every man is to another man more or less; he is hated of another and he hateth another more or less; and if his nature were let out to the full, there is that in him, “every man is against every man,” as is said of Ishmael. Homo homini lupus,’ adds our brave preacher.  And Abbe Grou speaks out with the same challenge from the opposite church pole, and says:  ’Yes; self-love makes us touchy, ready to take offence, ill-tempered, suspicious, severe, exacting, easily offended; it keeps alive in our hearts a certain malignity, a secret joy at the mortifications which befall our neighbour; it nourishes our readiness to criticise, our dislike at certain persons, our ill-feeling, our bitterness, and a thousand other things prejudicial to charity.’

3.  ‘Myself is my own worst enemy,’ says Abbe Grou.  That is to say, we may have enemies who hate us more than we hate ourselves, and enemies who would hurt us, if they could, as much as we hurt ourselves; but the Abbe’s point is that they cannot.  And he is right.  No man has ever hurt me as I have hurt myself.  There are men who hate me so much that they would poison my life of all its peace and happiness if they could.  But they cannot.  They cannot; but let them not be cast down on that account, for there is one who can do, and who will do as long as he lives, what they cannot do.  A man’s foes, to be called foes, are in his own house:  they are in his own heart.  Let our enemies attend to their own peace and happiness, and our self-love will do all, and more than all, that they would fain do.  At the most, they and their ill-will can only give occasion to our self-love; but it is our self-love that seizes upon the occasion, and through it rends and distorts our own hearts.  And were our hearts only pure of self-love, were our hearts only clothed with meekness and humility, we could laugh at all the ill-will of our enemies as leviathan laughs at the shaking of a spear.  ‘Know thou,’ says A Kempis to his son, ’that the love of thyself doth do thee more hurt than anything in the whole world.’  Yes; but we shall never know that by merely reading